Irish IndependentBy Kevin Myers THE black rat, courtesy of bubonic plague, proved this was one world. The great Asian flu in 1918–19 did something similar. And the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s did likewise, this time proving that …

Wait till he finds out that one of Wikipedia's "house biases" is a general favoritism towards men's rights.......

It's worthwhile to link his BLP. Not very friendly, is it? He's a crusty old man with a column in the Independent. They pay him to say outrageous things in print, to sell more papers. BFD. An idiot he may be, but he's of minor importance.

Yet Wikipedia, as is their wont, are rummaging around in Myers' past writing history for "bad things" to put down about him.

Irish IndependentBy Kevin Myers THE black rat, courtesy of bubonic plague, proved this was one world. The great Asian flu in 1918–19 did something similar. And the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s did likewise, this time proving that …

Irish IndependentBy Kevin Myers THE black rat, courtesy of bubonic plague, proved this was one world. The great Asian flu in 1918–19 did something similar. And the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s did likewise, this time proving that …

The "libel" part of the article, for the benefit of those like me who arrived late:

QUOTE

If you haven’t been libelled by Wikipedia, you probably love it. I have been libelled by it, and I regard it as a potential source of very great evil. The Wikipedia entry on me a couple of years ago said I was a child-rapist who sodomised boys in Belfast, my crimes being covered up by my masters in British intelligence. It is impossible to imagine a more wicked and lethal libel, an incitement to murder in a land replete with murderers. That’s Wikipedia for you, the intellectual bathhouse of our times, in which you can swap personal fluids and fatal viruses with complete strangers.

Do this. Find out the name of a really big banker on Wall Street, and just see how little information Wikipedia has on him. Then check anyone in Irish life who is well-known but not rich. Contrast the entries. The really rich powerful man probably has a skeletal entry, not too many scandals, and no information about where he lives. But the entry of the less powerful will not merely list his home address but also much private material, plus — if he has any enemies — possibly many falsehoods, as I discovered.

The post is available on a Republican site. (No not a Mitt or Newt type of Republican.) The site links mainstream Sinn Fein and IRA sites and not the splinter groups, so there's no point in dreaming about your favourite Wikipedians being knee-capped.

This post has been edited by Eppur si muove: Tue 24th January 2012, 3:34pm

That's Wikipedia for you, the intellectual bathhouse of our times, in which you can swap personal fluids and fatal viruses with complete strangers.

I treat Wikipedia with the same intellectual respect I would a football chant. I am in a minority.

In the past decade, Wikipedia has produced the greatest "information" revolution in history. But what actually is a "fact" in an internet-world that consists of a cyber-rabble bawling malevolent gibberish along with scientific truth? Who knows which is which? And who are the thousands of people who write the Wikipedia entries? Do you know any of their names? Thanks to the internet, we have travelled back to the intellectual anarchy of the 17th century pamphleteers.

Plagiarised Wikipedia quotes, copied and pasted, are now universal media-fare. The word viral takes on a new meaning: the sewers are no longer underground, but are pumping their bilge into the food-fair. And as we wade knee-deep in all this mixture of nourishment and effluent, who knows what is good and what is toxic rubbish?

In other words, freedom needs consensual rules -- otherwise the outcome is the freedom to tyrannise, to bully, to marginalise, to cheat, to oppress. This is what we are already seeing in the sordid universe of the free internet, with its depraved galaxies of hysteria, its solar systems of malice and its malevolently circling comets of vindictive dementia. What happens when a really powerful force is able to mobilise such cosmic hatreds? History -- 1789, 1917 -- supplies the answer.